While I haven’t completely finished blood elf history, a lot of the events that happened to these fel-loving arcane-sucking addicts happened after the introduction of the Burning Crusade expansion. I’ll be doing a detailed list of posts regarding the lore and story behind the Burning Crusade at some point, but for now I think it’s safe to stop at the stopping point I found with the blood elves in Azeroth.

It may seem like the ‘blood elf’ portion of blood elf history is awfully short – and it is. The sin’dorei didn’t become the sin’dorei until quite recently in the Warcraft timeline. For now though, it’s time to wrap up with some of the most commonly asked questions and misconceptions about the little pointy eared buggers, as well as making sense of some of the in-game contradictions.

Blood elves are night elves?

Oh heck no. They were, at one point in time – mind you this was well over 10,000 years ago in the Warcraft time line. But the changes that struck them after they left Nordrassil’s range of protection were enough to dramatically differentiate them from the night elves you know today.

So who are these high elves wandering around then? They don’t have the green eyes but they look like the blood elves do.

Those are the high elves that left back after the Second War. Remember when Anasterian pulled his support from the Alliance, Kael’thas stayed behind because he was in the Kirin Tor? There were other high elves that stayed behind as well, to continue teaching the humans and other races the magic that they’d learned. These high elves weren’t affected by the destruction of the Sunwell – why? Probably because they had spent so much time away from it that they were nowhere near as closely tied to it as the elves that lived in Silvermoon proper.

These high elves had to learn proper control, and how to deal with being away from the Sunwell right from the start – so its destruction simply didn’t affect them in the same way. It may also be (and this is speculation, mind) that they learned a few things from the creatures they were teaching about alternate ways of keeping that power that is inherent to their survival alive. The humans they taught weren’t really tied to the Sunwell after all – they looked for ley lines and other sources of magic to pull their abilities from, so perhaps the high elves just learned to do that.

How come the high elves are allied with the Alliance? Or they con friendly with the Alliance anyway, but they don’t seem to like the blood elves at all.

Because these high elves that left did so in order to teach the various Alliance races magic. It could be that they didn’t agree with Anasterian’s decision to pull his support from the Alliance, it could be that they saw the path the quel’dorei of Quel’Thalas were headed down, and they simply didn’t wish to follow that path. And now that the sin’dorei are obviously following a much darker path…well, they don’t really want anything to do with that.

A brief recap: The quel’dorei, or ‘high elves’ were banished from Kalimdor by the night elves after throwing a bit of a temper tantrum, and headed to the Eastern Kingdoms. Once there, they made some new friends in the humans of the Arathor Empire, and some new enemies in the trolls of the Amani Empire. They joined the first forming of the Alliance that came about as a result of Stormwind’s destruction, but a lot of their trees got burned down in the resulting war with the orcs and trolls. After the war, they threw another, smaller, more polite temper tantrum and withdrew from the Alliance; choosing to live solely in Quel’Thelas and ignore the Alliance goings on, save for a small minority of high elves that chose instead to work with the humans.

So by this point in high elf history, there are, once again, two factions starting to come into play. While most of the elves were content to once more retreat to the Sunwell and the spires of Quel’Thalas, there were others, priests and sorcerers, that wished to continue exploring the world and teaching the humans the arts of magic. Among the high elves that chose to live outside of Quel’Thalas was the son of Anasterian, Prince Kael’thas Sunstrider.

The history of the Blood Elves in World of Warcraft is somewhat convoluted, as the little buggers originally started out as…well, as kaldorei. That’s right, night elves and blood elves were once the same thing. Physically, they look very different – and from a societal standpoint, they’re incredibly different as well. So why are the blood elves now a part of the Horde, while night elves are firmly on the Alliance’s side? What happened to make the Blood Elves a bunch of bad guys? And just how do they get such beautiful hair without a lot of product buildup? Some of these questions to be answered this week!

The Sin’dorei as they are currently called weren’t always the blonde, bright-eyed, egomaniacal self obsessed little buggers that you see in World of Warcraft today. Sin’dorei is a name they gave themselves after events in their history warranted the name change. Originally, they were called the Quel’dorei, or high elves – children of noble birth. In order to properly understand where these elves came from, one should probably take a look at the Night Elf History segments from a few weeks ago: Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. I will be picking up with elf history shortly after the timeline presented in the night elf history segment – after the Sundering that split the world into the continents we know today.

Don’t Bleach, Use Chamomile Tea For Natural, Sun-Kissed Highlights

The kaldorei had been firmly split into two different factions – there were the night elves, and the quel’dorei. While the night elves worshipped Elune and followed a largely druidic, nature-based path, the Quel’dorei had become masters of managing the arcane energies and magic of the Well of Eternity – a mastery that had proven disastrous in the War of the Ancients. There was another difference between the two factions however. As the night elves never came out during the day, and usually did their work and worship by night, they had darkened skin and hair, brilliant hues of purple, blue and green, and their eyes retained a normal silver glow – gold in the cases of those that showed druidic potential. The quel’dorei however found it better to work under the light of the sun, and found their skin and their hair fading as well into a lighter version of the night elves dark colors.